I was at my grandmother’s house on the weekend before Thanksgiving Day 1978. My brother and I helped her with a few chores, did our homework, and watched television. I remember us watching a hockey or football game that was interrupted with news reports about fatalities in Guyana. A Congressman had been killed. I remember the adults present that day flooding into my grandmother’s living room, aghast. California Congressman Leo Ryan had been in Guyana to investigate human rights violations at “Jonestown,” the jungle commune established by American cult leader Jim Jones. Jones’ security guards ambushed Ryan and his aides while they attempted to board a pair of small aircraft on a remote jungle airstrip. Bob Brown, an NBC cameraman covering Ryan’s visit, captured the ambush on film before being shot himself. As horrendous as the ambush was, a far more sinister tragedy would soon emerge. Jones’s followers, at his urging, committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Ade. Babies too young to voluntarily drink the Kool-Ade, and those who resisted, were injected with the poison via syringe. Jones himself was found dead with an apparently self-inflicted bullet wound in the head. All told, 918 people, including 304 children, died at Jonestown. Sometimes, thinking about the scale of this tragedy, I tremble. Seriously. How could 900+ people, most apparently willingly, have been induced to drink the Kool-Ade? Fred D’Aguiar’s spectacular new novel, CHILDREN OF PARADISE (Harper Collins), attempts to answer that question. We get the brutality, the chaos, the attempts at mind control, the delusional paranoia, and the mass hysteria that afflicted the commune, but what I loved most about the novel is its narrative path. The book is only loosely based on the actual events of Jonestown, allowing D’Aguiar to take creative and compelling liberties in the telling of the tragedy. The Jim Jones-type character, named here as “Father” and “the preacher,” is scantly present during the first third of the novel. Instead, D’Aguiar ushers us into the lives of the commune’s residents: a mother and daughter (Joyce and Trina), two of Trina’s young friends (Rose and Ryan), a pair of guards (Kevin and Eric), the riverboat captain who ferries people to the commune, and a most peculiar gorilla (Adam) who acts as the commune mascot but is later shown as a wonderfully sentient creature with strong attachments to those who bear the brunt of Father’s brutality. I must confess that, being irrationally drawn to the Great Man theory of history, I was initially disappointed that “Father” was not more present in the opening pages, but by focusing on the other characters, D’Aguiar shows us the consequences of Father’s tyrannical reign. We become emotionally invested in these characters. We care about their plight, their struggles, in a way that would not have been possible had D’Aguiar allowed Father to overwhelm the narrative from the get-go. I’m a great fan of dystopian fiction, but D’Aguiar paints a dystopia unlike any other I have read before. Reading George Orwell as a teenager was one of the formative events of my life. I love George Saunders. I loved Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning North Korean novel, THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON, yet no other novel has made me think as much about organizations and structures, the individual’s relationships to power, and the yin-yang dichotomy of public vs. private yearnings. D’Aguiar’s commune is vivid, credible, and maddening. We learn very early that something is horribly amiss at the commune. A teenage prefect charged with keeping order, rats out his mother for mumbling something that contradicts what Father has said. “A prefect shouts for help to come right away and deal with his rebellious mother. Two guards approach the teenager and his mother. She tries to tell her son to be quiet, that she meant nothing by what she said to him. But the prefect, in keeping with his training to listen and report anything suspicious that he hears, no matter the source, tells the guards… The guards congratulate the prefect on his loyalty to Father, and the commune, over and above any loyalty to blood, and second only in loyalty to the Most High. They grab the woman and march away. The teenager looks satisfied but not completely so. He looks around for someone else, anyone else, nearby to tell him he did the right thing in reporting his mother to the guards.” As D’Aguiar writes, “It seems ever adult in the commune is bent on emulating the ways of the preacher.” Characters quickly learn to stifle their private doubts about the fitness of Father’s autocratic rule or risk public beatings. Just as at the real Jonestown, malcontents are flung down cobwebbed wells until they repent. Young Trina, who must be ten or twelve years old, “has worked out already at her delicate age that everything they do at the commune, each chore or demonstration of loyalty, has to carry with it like a shadow a performance for some other thing that can never be shown.” “Trina waves at her mother by pretending to wave away a fly. Trina even says, Shoo, fly. And she speaks quite loud. Every muscle in Joyce’s body wants to wave back at Trina, but she knows better to attract the attention of a prefect or guard. Like every parent at the commune, she has to downplay public displays of affection toward her child. Trina belongs less to her and more to everyone in the community.” Commune residents, including children, are chronically underfed. When a loaf of bread goes missing, guards storm into the dormitories to flush out the culprit. At school, children are ordered to cane-whip the thief, who happens to be their classmate. Trina, whom Father has treated with special attention, resists until she is counseled about the consequences of resisting. “The head teacher leans in close to Trina’s ear and whispers that this order comes from the preacher, and not to obey it would mean terrible things for a lot of people, not just Trina. The teacher urges Trina to think of her mother. Trina takes the cane and holds it beside her. The cane is as tall as Trina.” In such an environment, a smile becomes an act of bravery. Trina “weighs on scales in her mind just how much happiness there is among the children as opposed to misery. This morning is ruled by misery. [One of her classmates] is missing. To get through her day, she decides to smile at as many children as possible.” Later, while talking with Rose, Trina tells how she is able to survive in the commune. “She says that while the body may be trapped in this place, the mind is always free to roam wherever it feels safe.” As the novel progresses, the preacher emerges as a central character. Vain, amphetamine-amped and tricked out in dark sunglasses and Elvis-style jumpsuits, he’s prone to blood lust and incoherent rants. We see his grandiosity, his hypocrisy, his self-importance, his love for—if this makes any sense—an ordered chaos. After guards assault one too many children, he orders the children to cane their parents. Father’s bent on stockpiling vast quantities of cyanide. Though he’s miserly on rations for his flock, those fortunate to be invited into his house “eat fried chicken and cole-slaw, imported apple pie and cream, and drink as much reconstituted Kool-Aid as the can.” And it is with that casually-thrown “Kool-Aid” reference that we begin to worry about the fate of the commune. Two-thirds through the novel, the endgame becomes clear. Suffering from a persecution complex like no other, Father devises a mass suicide plan should outsiders disrupt his version of “paradise.” In theory, since we all know what is going to happen, I would have thought that the novel’s tremendous narrative propulsion would wane as we near its finish, but it is to D’Aguiar’s great credit that the last hundred pages are unputdownable. At moments, it seems possible that someone will step forward to put an end to Father’s madness. Adam’s sentient ways, and the protection he offers to the otherwise-doomed children fascinate us, but ultimately—because we care about the characters—it is the drama of who (if anyone) will survive the tragedy that keeps us reading. Addendum: Okay, don’t take my word about how great this novel is. Go ahead and check out The New York Times’review.

I’ve been revising, furiously, something big-ish. Spindly eraser rubbings now cover the top of my desk for all the corrections and re-corrections, as do several notebooks and the 399 manuscript pages I’m now revising. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t looked at these pages since December, when I last revised them. Back then, I remembered the manuscript as being just perfect, which I know sounds ridiculous—but really, that’s how I felt. Now, seeing the pages afresh, I shudder.

Some passages I can read without cringing, but much of the writing strikes me as lazy. When writing previous drafts of this material, I opted for a bloated style jam-packed with adjectives and adverbs and a whole lot of ramble—it was a decision I consciously chose, but now I haven’t the foggiest reason why.

It makes me want to apologize to all my friends I had foisted the manuscript upon, many of whom devoted considerable attention to it.

[But thank you, dear friends, for your reading suggestions. I’ve been reading and/or re-reading the Bradbury, Huxley, and Ishiguro titles you suggested. Yesterday, I started on Terry Eagleton’s ON EVIL, which is actually quite engaging. And to my brother Mike, I admit it: I haven’t read enough Gramsci.]

Besides tightening the sentences, I’m strengthening the characters’ relationships to one another, inserting a few different plot elements, and doing a whole lot of cutting. By the time I’m done, it may even have heart.

~~~

Years ago, Tony Earley talked with me at the Sewanee Writers Conference about the revision process. Earley’s suggestion was to look for ways that elements within a work can refer back to themselves. At the time, I was writing a story that featured a character reading off a set of new-agey affirmations from an index card. Earley advised that I look for other ways to use an index card in that story. So I had another character, a salesman, read off a sales spiel from an index card. The reappearance of certain images and effects, if not overdone, can provide greater narrative and thematic coherence.

I’ve been thinking about this advice a lot over the last few weeks. Thank you, Tony.

~~~

Last week, George Saunders gave a couple of programs at Hollins University. Saunders is easily my favorite short story writer. Thursday night, he read “Victory Lap,” a story that appeared in The New Yorker a couple years back while I was at The MacDowell Colony. For those who haven’t been, The MacDowell Colony is as close to heaven as I’ll likely experience on this planet. People are just so generous there. I remember talking a lot with others there about “Victory Lap.” It was while at the Colony that I completed the last 20,000+ words of the novel. Hearing Saunders read the story brought back memories of how elated I felt back then.

The reading itself was fantastic. No one should pass up the opportunity to hear Saunders read. Everyone laughed, and everyone just about cried, all at the right places.

On Friday, Saunders gave a craft talk. Among other things, he talked about his revision process. He’s a rabid reviser. For some stories, he says he goes through a hundred drafts. Which I can believe—really, his work can be that good. His strategy is to print out story drafts and go through them with a pencil, working on all the parts that make him cringe. If on one day he can go through eight pages without cringing, his goal for the next day is to make it through page nine.

I wish I had brought a voice recorder to his talks.

Among the things he watches for when revising are characters and situations that condescend to readers. Which, looking at my own work, I am guilty of doing.

It’s kinda neat, actually, realizing that I’m going through the same process as he goes through. As every writer probably goes through.

Saunders news of note: he’ll have a new story in The New Yorker in the next few weeks. This particular story stemmed out of the same original project that produced his last New Yorker story, “Escape from Spiderhead,” but he says that the two stories are wildly different.

Hollins cool thing of note: 2011 Hollins MFA Ashley Good gave perhaps the best introduction to a reading that I’ve heard. The art of introducing a reader is, sadly, vastly overlooked. Too often, introductions are nothing more than bullets points extracted from the reader’s CV--Jane Doe’s stories have appeared X, Y, and Z. Her novel, ---, won the PDQ Award for Fill-In-The-Blank. Good’s introduction had heart, touching upon Saunders’ uniqueness, but also touching in its own right.

Someday, may we all be so lucky as to be introduced by someone as thoughtful as Good.

And may we all live to give such an introduction for another writer.

~~~

Okay. The rub about revisions is this:

This is not the first time I revised these pages (which, in previous incarnations, numbered almost 475 pages). Twice last year I tackled them, both times vastly improving the manuscript. Both times though, I was just as shocked at, well, how shoddy my previous drafts appeared.

There’ll come a time, surely, when the draft I’m cobbling together now will seem just as bad. I’ve seen this also in the stories I’ve written. I don’t even send out stories anymore that just a few years ago I classified as the best I’d ever written.

Over time, this recognition of one’s writerly fallibility leaches over into other aspects of one’s life. If my judgment of my writing could be so suspect, how can I trust my judgment in other areas?

Revising is a lot like collaboration, but instead of collaborating with another writer, you collaborate with your past writing self. I’ve felt this in all my previous revisions as well. It startles me to see how much my inclinations have changed just over the last couple of years since I began this project. I am no longer the same writer.

Stephen King gave an interview earlier this week at The Atlantic Monthly. He says, “I never started a book that I expected to finish. Because it always feels like a job that's much too big for a little guy like me.”

Although at times I want to throttle my past writing self (especially for that horrible penultimate chapter!), I’m also grateful for all the heavy lifting he did. The material is fresh, the story (mostly) compelling, the structure largely sound.

My present-day self looks at the manuscript that my past writing self produced and thinks, Wow! I would never have been able to finish something that big by myself. Thank you!